How Rust Belt company towns evolve in the age of e-commerce

Bethlehem Steel casts a long shadow over the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. Blast furnaces remain, although they have been silent for more than 20 years. The closure of the mill took away much of the well-paid blue-collar work in the region, and the news of the time made it sound very definitive.

But then no one imagined e-commerce.

Demand for delivery the next day or even the same day has left huge challenges on the stairs of brick-and-mortar stores, but it has also created a demand for large distribution centers with a lot of work. Don Cunningham, president and CEO of Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation, said: “It simply came to our notice then. We need an army of people to do that.”

Today, there are almost as many warehouse jobs in the region as there are manufacturing sites. That’s a big milestone, Cunningham told correspondent Lee Cowan: “From a purely economic standpoint, for high school graduates or less workers, something has been created that frankly doesn’t exist in this area since from the times of cement mills and slate quarries and steel mills “.

Nationwide, Amazon alone has added more than 500,000 jobs since 2020 alone, making it the second largest private employer in the country, just behind Walmart.

Most e-commerce stores also offer benefits and salaries that reach $ 20 an hour, which effectively makes it the minimum wage, at least out there.

“We say that anyone who wants a job has a job for you in this industry,” said Susan Larkin, vice president of Allied Personnel Services. That said, Larkin warns that while money can be good, warehouse work can also be quite exhausting. Employers, he said, are looking for “warehouse athletes.”

“Is that a term? Warehouse Athlete?” Cowan asked.

“That’s a term, they consider their employees ‘warehouse athletes.’ So, you know, getting into that role is going to be a physical job.”

Long hours with often rigid quotas make the turnover rate of these jobs quite high. But shortening supply chains is now the name of the game, with almost every retailer competing for store space across the country to fuel their own online sales.

Adrian Ponsen, who analyzes industrial real estate for CoStar, says a total of nearly two billion square feet of new warehouse space has been built in the country over the past five years. “That equates to about 33,000 distribution center football fields,” he said. “You see, places like Dallas, Inland Empire in Southern California, Chicago and Atlanta, we’re seeing record spending. A recent Amazon facility that was built on the site of a former GM assembly plant in Wilmington “Delaware is the largest commercial structure ever built in Delaware.”

In the Lehigh Valley, Lamont McClure County Executive is fighting. “We’re at a turning point,” he said.

McClure fears the rural character of the region is now in danger. “We admire the people who are working hard in these warehouses, and we don’t want their jobs to go away. What we’re saying is that we don’t need them anymore,” he said. “They were done.”

He knows he can’t match the deep pockets of a UPS or a Target, they both have a big footprint here, but he’s still trying. McClure has spent $ 12 million of county money over the past four years buying up plots of farmland to preserve the development of the warehouse and, in the process, hopes to help clean up the air as well.

“It’s dangerous and scary,” McClure told Cowan. “And our people just got enough of the truck traffic.”

“Noise!”

“Yes. But there’s a lot of air pollution in the Lehigh Valley.”

Trucks often use the main street, a two-lane road that runs through the historic center of Bethlehem, to reach a nearby road. Breena Holland, an associate professor at Lehigh University, has been measuring the amount of black carbon particles in the exhaust of passing trucks. And here, he said, he is especially focused.

He showed Cowan a reading of the traffic emissions: “This point just there is that big, 18-wheeled white one that just passed,” he said.

“What we’re trying to do is measure episodic exposures at the lung level – what people on the street are exposed to when trucks pass by,” he said.

However, with the increase in traffic, there is an increase in jobs. Lehigh Valley is one of the few areas of Rust Belt that has actually grown, rather than shrunk. For Don Cunningham of the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation, this is a triumph. But this area knows perhaps better than anywhere that even the best booms … usually have a bankruptcy.

“Life is an evolution and economies are an evolution,” Cunningham said. “And I think anyone who builds an economy thinking it’s going to be like this forever is a little silly. Things are always changing.”

For more information:

• Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation
• Allied Personnel Services
• Cost
• Breena Holland, Lehigh University
• Lamont McClure, County Executive, Northampton County, Pa.
• Video from Amazon Delaware courtesy of WITN Channel 22 / Saquan Stimpson

Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Ed Givnish.

In:
• e-commerce